Foundational strains

Are there strains that a well equipped breeder keeps around, either in mother, clone, seed or pollen form to add to or correct new crosses?

What I think I know:
Crossing with an Afgani could increase trich production and stability. G13HP88 seems to do some magic. Ruderalis seem useful in shortening flower time to a point (after which the auto mechanism comes to dominate). Lowryder genetics produce more compact plants.
Skunk seems to be a breeder favorite, and i am told my Purple Kush will be good for crossing.

I heard K. Jodrey say the ideal male does not pass on his own characteristics but reenforces the qualities that are desired in the female. Is this a widely held belief or simply a criteria for male selection based on a specific desirable female.

I am probably wrong about half of this. I’m cool with being corrected. What references if any have this sort of information?

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Thank you for including this part!
Grow info based on anecdote can be useful - where it’s impractical to gather rigorously tested research data - but actual references are the best.
Even if it’s behind a paywall, linking to quality research is essential to further group knowledge for growing this beloved plant.

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I’ve heard that skunk#1 was foundational because in it’s time it was a 4 way cross that a huge variety of phenos could be bred from it using inbreeding.
Each and every strain has its merits.

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Unsure about the % of folks holding the opinion, but I heard MrSoul essentially say the same thing. Choose “sons whose fathers produced ideal daughters/sisters to make more ideal daughters & sistren” … b/c that’s what we’re after. :wink:

:evergreen_tree: giggity

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This doesn’t make sense to me. What is the point of hybridizing if not to take some qualities of both the male and female. If you want a transparent male your best option is to inbreeding and selection.

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I like that term, transparent male. :thinking:

If you’re selling the seeds outcrossing to a transparent male to increase hybrid vigor will more often than not produce better/faster/stronger children in one generation, rather than proper line-breeding and RRS for a couple years.

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If you, as a breeder, had to start fresh today and you could select any 5 strains (lets say 10 reg beans each), and you couldn’t get anything new for 5 years, which would you choose.

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Kind of depends on the criteria of characteristics for “a successful male” and who you read up on ime. Two breeders I respect massively can differ. Say Nevil who kept clones and worked lines of proven plants and some one like Classic who kept clones but preferred to find and select new males from seed each generation but would keep clones as a back up. Great topic for a thread.

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Pretty dry but interesting to some of us geeks. Mostly about definition of “species” & hybrid plant & animal examples.

:evergreen_tree: giddyup

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Behind a paywall. Yeah, here’s the thing about that. A significant portion of that research, is/was taxpayer funded. In fact, all the canna research was funded by the Feds, but if you want to read any of the results, it’s $20-40 per page. That doesn’t work for me, and I’m not the only one who feels that way. So some of those people decided to do something about it.

They started a site called [Libgen](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/, and one of the areas of interest is “scientific articles”. There’s a site called, [Researchgate]( https://www.researchgate.net/, that has a lot of good stuff, but lot of theirs isn’t directly downloadable, but has the DOI #, (it looks like this: 10.1002/9781119187080.app8), Copy that number, go to Libgen, click the scientific articles option, paste the DOI # in, and hit enter. The sample DOI # above will take you to an article about Orchid micro-propagation. :slight_smile:

I don’t know how they do it, but you can find almost any type of research, and it’s totally free. There’s a lot of research on plants and gardening in general, and there’s a lot of research on our plant specifically. If you’re cool with that kind of thing, give it a whirl. It’s kick-ass. :upside_down:
G

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If I had to pick 5 I would go

Northern lights (cause it can fix about anything)
White widow (hard to fuck up)
Durban Poison (gotta have a sativa )
Skunk #1 or the most skunky I can find
NYCD (cause one sativa is never enough)

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A Thai
A tropical African
A South American
A Himalayan
And something from a desert

On the paywall subject, sci-hub dot tw is the bees knees.

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@DiggySoze Awesome! Can you give an idea of what elements these landraces bring to your breeding?

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@TheShowMeHomie - I think we might have similar tastes. This is exactly the kind of information I am wanting. I am interested in growing an NL in the near future.

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They just encompass the greatest variety of genetics I could think of at the time.

I operate on the belief that a larger gene pool is inherently better, and that excessive refinement will break a cultivar when they run into a problem that becomes a catastrophic failure because they no longer have the genes to deal with it. By starting with the most different IBLs possible, you have the whole gamut to rummage through. Then you can refine only the traits necessary for the strain to fit your desired description and leave the rest intact. Hell, after a couple rounds of proper RRS you could mess around and pull five distinct strains out of a true F1.

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Seemed fitting to foundational

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I love your list! May I ask what RRS is? I ask, because I recently ran some G13 x Skunk from Duke Diamond, and all four phenos are completely different. Whereas when I grow cultivars from Bodhi, there are usually two major phenos.

I’m really enjoying this thread as I want to learn more about different genetics. :slight_smile:

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Reciprocal recurrent selection(?) iirc. So let’s say you want to cross a C99 and a Herijuana starting with six seeds of each, perfect split, three males and three females each.

Step one, grow out all of your seeds, label all of your plants and cross a clone of every male to a clone of every female, could even reverse females if you were dealing with femme seeds. Harvest all of these plants individually, store the seeds separately, and label accordingly.
You’ll have two groups, we’ll call all seeds from Herijuana mothers GroupA, and all seeds from C99 mothers GroupB. Within GroupA you’ll have:
motherA1 x fatherB1, motherA1 x fatherB2, motherA1 x fatherB3,
motherA2 x fatherB1, motherA2 x fatherB2, motherA2 x fatherB3
motherA3 x fatherB1, motherA3 x fatherB2, motherA3 x fatherB3
and the same 9 for group B, but exactly opposite. If we were dealing with femme seeds, we could reverse all six females of each strain and end up with 72 different F1 crosses we’d need to grow out.

Step two, grow a sample group from all 18 batches of seeds, and only keep the best batches of GroupA and the best batches from GroupB to continue. Discard the undesirable batches.

Step three, Open pollinate GroupA, harvest the seeds as one batch, label accordingly. Open pollinate GroupB, harvest these seeds as a second batch, label accordingly.

Step four start again with GroupA and GroupB in place of Herijuana and C99.

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RRS - Reciprocal Recurrent Selection.
As I understand it, it’s a method of breeding that involves deep backcrossing, taking into account the differential successs in expression of sought after traits through the downstream lines.

I Googled but most of it is currently over my head.

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HA! What @DiggySoze said.

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